GRASS ROOTS PEACEMAKERS

UN short-term emergency aid of food and basic needs for victims of famine or natural disasters is handled by the UN Disaster and Relief Organization (UNDRO). The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is concerned with supplying food and training to developing countries over the long-term. FAO co-ordinates international programs to provide donated food to needy countries or store it for an emergency. In a recent year, FAO’s World Food Program shipped $1.1 billion from one hundred countries in cash and commodities, sent to seventy-nine operations in thirty-two countries, affecting some fifteen million people. Food aid deliveries are often hampered by local chaos, slow response, overlapping agencies, and poor delivery efficiency. These were factors in a critical worsening of the famine in Somalia. The UN also provides advisers, education programs, and materials to improve techniques and results in agriculture, fisheries, forestry, livestock, and land reform.

The critical health situation, especially in the less developed countries and urban slums, is of major concern for the UN and its chief agency, the World Health Organization (WHO). Nearly half the world’s population live in areas where malaria, AIDS, cancer, measles, heart disease, and tetanus are major killers. Every day about forty thousand children die of preventable disease and starvation—a total of fourteen million every year. WHO provides assistance to local health agencies and to field volunteers of medical services organizations, such as Doctors Without Borders. An estimated one million people in developing countries are reached each year by WHO programs. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reaches many millions of children through age fifteen in 162 countries every year. A major UNICEF program provides vaccinations to over eighty percent of the world’s children exposed to infectious diseases and to AIDS. The challenge for the future will be to maintain and expand the fight against disease and poverty while securing a clean environment.

Experienced observers of the UN stress that there are pervasive causes of the world’s increasing inhumanity, mass misery, and violence. They have examined how the UN responded to achieve its goals despite these negative trends and what needs to be done to improve its effectiveness. A summary of many different views and recommendations is constructive:

•The UN is basically the universal extension of ourselves, our national behavior. We are citizens of both our nation and the United Nations, and have as “dual citizens” the ultimate responsibility for the UN;

•Governments too often allow the UN to function only in uncoordinated fits and starts, without enough sustained effort against root causes. Neglected causes are now producing crises and human suffering on an increasing scale, placing massive burdens on the limited capabilities of the UN to respond. We citizens therefore have no choice but to tackle both the causes and the consequences of human neglect and suffering;

•Governments should provide trained Rapid Response forces available instantly to the Secretary-General, as urged by Sir Brian Urquhart,2 to prevent such horrors as occurred in Rwanda before they expand into genocide;

•The UN General Assembly and Security Council should vote to approve the authorization procedure recommended on page XII of The Responsibility To Protect report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (see Appendix G);

•It is hypocritical for governments that are promoting their own arms sales to criticize levels of military expenditure in other countries;

•We must find a truly ethical standard in national and international decision-making to replace the unethical practice of the powerful demanding their own aggressiveness be accepted, while that of others is punished. Major powers have used outright economic intimidation of impoverished countries to secure their votes or their silence on many UN issues. The Charter invokes the best in all of us when it asks that we “practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors.” We must be more vigilant and resolute in demanding that our decision-makers act according to this principle;